All history was at first oral.

The public pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit.

Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of a larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.

So willing is every man to flatter himself, that the difference between approving laws, and obeying them, is frequently forgotten; he that acknowledges the obligations of morality and pleases his vanity with enforcing them to others, concludes himself zealous in the cause of virtue.